Facts About Kelewele
Plantain, believed to have originated in southeast Asia refers to the cooking banana, cultivars of the banana plant, which produces an edible fruit that is full of starch and rarely eaten raw. Though similar in appearance, the two banana varieties are typically used in very different ways. Usually, in many cultures where this fruit is a staple diet, it is boiled, fried, or cooked while green due to the starch levels. In some African regions, the plantain can be reduced to flour or for beer-making. However, in many instances an encounter with plantains is usually in fried form.
Fried plantain is a dish cooked wherever plantains grow, from West Africa to East Africa as well as Central and South America and the Caribbean countries like Haiti to Cuba and in many parts of Southeast Asia, where fried snacks are widely popular. In Indonesia it is called gorengan. It is called alloco in Côte d'Ivoire and dodo in Western Nigeria otherwise known as simply fried plantain in other parts of Nigeria. Kelewele is a fried spicy plantain or can be fried as a side dish for Red Red (African stewed black-eyed peas) and fish stew in Ghana.
Fried plantain is also eaten in some countries in South America or the Caribbean where African influence is present. For example, in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico, it is common to cut plantains in slices, fry them until they are yellow, smash them between two plates and fry them again. This is also a common dish in Haiti, referred to as "bannann peze", and throughout Central America, referred to as patacones in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Ecuador, and as tostones in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Puerto Rico. In Honduras and Venezuela they are referred to as "tajadas".
Togo